Hospitality Labour Costs by Region
What staff cost where you operate — statutory rates, market pay, and what they add up to as a percentage of sales.
Every rate here has a date on it
Wage floors move on a calendar. The UK upratings land on 1 April, Ireland changes on 1 January, Ontario on 1 October, and most US states cluster around New Year with Florida and Alaska going their own way. That's a lot of dates to keep track of when you're also running a business.
So each rate on these pages shows when it was last checked against the government source that publishes it, and there's a link straight through to the original if you want to confirm it yourself. We've wired the freshness check into our build: if a figure goes more than four months without someone going back to the source, or a scheduled change date passes, the site won't deploy until it's been looked at. It's a blunt tool, and it means the number you're reading is one we still stand behind.
A wage rate isn't a labour cost
The statutory floor tells you what you can't go below. What an hour actually costs you is a different number, because employer taxes, holiday pay and pension contributions all sit on top of it, and they climb automatically whenever the floor does. That's why the April or January increase always lands harder than the headline percentage suggests.
It also matters for comparison. The National Restaurant Association's labour benchmarks include benefits, so measuring your own gross wages against them will make you look better than you are. Work out the real figure with the labour cost percentage calculator, then hold it against the benchmarks for your type of business.
What each page covers
Statutory rates and the age bands where they apply, how tips are treated in that jurisdiction, the scheduled date of the next change, and the on-costs that sit above the headline number. Where an official source publishes median pay by role, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics does in the US, we point you at it.